How can poor and weak societies escape the trap of poverty? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers:<\/p>\n
Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their basic assumptions\u2014namely linear causality, a mechanical worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she proposes a new framework based on complex adaptive systems<\/strong>, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity\u2019s capacity for innovation.<\/p>\n Her analysis reveals two general lessons about development. Written with bold and rigorous research, this book opens an entirely new way of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone interested in building adaptive systems.<\/p>\n By combining her original perspective with more than 400 interviews with Chinese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs<\/strong>, the author systematically explains the complex process that transformed China in just 35 years from a communist backwater into a global powerhouse. Contrary to widespread misconceptions, she shows that China\u2019s great transformation was not driven by centralized authoritarian control, but rather by \u201cdirected improvisation\u201d<\/strong>\u2014top-down directives from Beijing combined with bottom-up improvisation among local officials.<\/p>\n How China Escaped the Poverty Trap<\/em> offers, in the fullest sense of the word, transformative ideas for analyzing and implementing socio-economic development and has the potential to exert major influence across many fields of social science.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yuen Yuen Ang is a Singaporean professor of political science who currently holds the Alfred Chandler Chair of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to the present book\u2014which was named one of the Best Books of 2017<\/strong> by Foreign Affairs<\/em>\u2014she is also the author of China\u2019s Gilded Age (2020)<\/em>.<\/p>\n From 2010 to 2011, she served as an assistant professor at Columbia University\u2019s School of International and Public Affairs, and in 2011 she was appointed associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. On January 12, 2023, she assumed a professorship at the Center for Economy and Society and the Department of Political Science in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.<\/p>\n Ang\u2019s research focuses on the interaction between industrial development, technological innovation, and political structures, with particular emphasis on China. She is also active in public policy debates, and her analyses have appeared in publications such as Foreign Affairs<\/em> and Project Syndicate<\/em>, among others.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" About the Book How can poor and weak societies escape the trap of poverty? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: \u201cStimulate growth first,\u201d \u201cBuild good institutions first,\u201d or \u201cSome lucky nations inherited good institutions that led to growth.\u201d Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their basic assumptions\u2014namely linear causality, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":3356,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[],"coauthors":[45],"class_list":["post-3350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-introduction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3351,"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350\/revisions\/3351"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3350"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranbri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nFirst, transformative change requires an adaptive governance system<\/strong> that empowers lower-level actors to devise new solutions to evolving problems.
\nSecond, the first step out of the poverty trap is to \u201cuse what you have.\u201d<\/strong> This means exploiting existing resources to create new markets\u2014even if doing so requires deviating from First World norms.<\/p>\nAbout the Author<\/h2>\n